I was looking forward to catching Kevin Closson at the Unconference but unfortunately the session was cancelled at the last minute. So spent some time having a nice chat with Chris Muir and Tim Hall who I had the pleasure to meet when I attended the ODOUG conference in Monterey earlier in the year.

I then attended an excellent roundtable discussion forum with the Oracle folks who write and manage the Oracle Cost Based Optimizer. Some excellent questions (including mine on the use of AUTO with method_opt ;) ), although I wasn’t totally convinced with the answer given. However, I had to clap and clap rather loudly when they made special mention of not setting the OPTIMIZER_INDEX_COST_ADJ paramater and recommending rather strongly not to touch this parameter at all. Something I’ve been suggesting for quite some time. I also got some encouraging feedback on resolving a couple of key issues I have with statistics gathering:

1) A better way of collecting the clustering factor statistics for indexes so that Oracle can remember more than just the last block it visited

2) The ability to collected extended statistics that span more than one table

Both are being actively looked at. However, the highlight for me was the fact they were playing “The Best Of Bowie” album after the presentation, just for me !!

Also had the pleasure of meeting Christian Antognini in person who’s writings I greatly respect.

My final session of the day and of the conference was a round table discussion with the Oracle Real-World Performance folks, including Graham Wood who I had the pleasure to meet earlier in the conference and Greg Rahn who I also met today for the first time. Again, a very good session with some very good questions and answers, especially the question of when should one rebuild an index and the answer that one should only do so in special cases. The fact that these guys promote this best practice in a large public forum such as this (although I was picked out by the panel from the audience that perhaps I should be up there answering this question !!), can only help in getting the message out there.

And so it ends. I had a fantastic time here at Oracle OpenWorld, met some fantastic people and made still more Oracle friends, but I’m now really looking forward to getting home after over 3 weeks on the road.

My first session was to attended Alex Gorbachev and Paul Vallee’s Unconference session on how to make DBAs highly available. Interesting discussion on some of the various challenges confronting DBAs, such as controlling the balance between the need for stability and availability vs. the need of some organisations for constant change requirements and the importance of delivering such change as quickly as possible. Also, whether the procedures and processes for managing and controlling change management, including industry and governmental governance requirements are a help and a good thing or a hindrance and a threat in just getting the job done. The answer IMHO is that it depends on how such guidelines are implement and policed. It’s somehow comforting to know that other DBAs face similar issues and concerns as your own.

I then attended an excellent presentation on the new features associated with Data Guard in 11g Release 2 (except for the section where an Apple customer described his experiences with Data Guard, during which I simply couldn’t understand a single word he said). This is certainly all of great interest for us at work with the ability of being able to configure a read-only database farm having obvious business potential. However, I was particularly impressed by the ability of Oracle when confronted with a block corruption to automatically fix the corruption by copying a healthy version of the block from a standby database (or indeed the Primary database if the corruption appears on the Standby side). The key word here is automatically and without a single error message being raised, except for a message written to the alert log. Impressive stuff.

The lunch today was simply superb, absolutely the nicest lunch I can ever enjoy having. Please note these comments are addressed specifically to Chris Muir who missed out on lunch and was hungry all afternoon as a result🙂

Then spend some time in the OTN lounge, catching up with a number of folks, including Cary Millsap. Looks like I might very well be presenting at the Hostsos Symposium next year if I can get enough free time organised.

Watched Larry’s Keynote address from the OTN lounge. I had a press pass that enabled me to watch the keynote up close but the free beers on offer at the OTN lounge convinced me this is the place to be😉 There wasn’t a lot new announced that I didn’t already know, although the 10 million dollar Exadata challenge to IBM is typical Ellison. However the highlight for me was the speech by Arnold Schwarzenegger during the keynote, very funny.

After missing out on all the prize draws yet again (I never, ever win these sorts of things, ever), I despondently made my way back to the hotel. Had a lovely dinner with my family who are over doing all the sightseeing things while I’m at the conference beforing making my way to the Oracle Appreciation Event on Treasure Island. Popped into the Aerosmith concert for 5 minutes, tick, seen them now and then over to see dear old Roger Daltrey who performed a really good set of mainly Who classics. Oracle certainly know how to put on an excellent show. However for me, the highlight was actually the coach ride to and from the event with the stunning views of the San Francisco lights as we crossed the Bay Bridge.

sadly, it all comes to an end tomorrow …

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The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle Corporation.

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If you wish to contact me directly, please do so at richard.foote@bigpond.com